Meta-game Awareness
Your Demon Hunter is aware that he exists in a Tabletop Combat Simulation. The consequences of this can be far-reaching, but most directly it allows you to use that coveted resource, “Out-of-Game Knowledge.” If you know it, your Demon Hunter knows it, and if he can persuade the other characters to listen to him, they can plan accordingly.

1. Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. Another definition refers to the game universe outside of the game itself.

In simple terms, using out-of-game information, or resources, to affect one’s in-game decisions.

2. Within actual entertainment games, the term metagame is used to describe either a game system layered over the game system, to increase enjoyable complexity, or a game system by which game rules are created, such as Nomic. Nomic is a sophisticated and simple example of a metagame popular as a pastime among philosophers and mathematicians, but has also spread widely among other people as a recreative pastime option. Some card games and board games allow pre-stated and set rule changes depending on extraneous events, such as distinct states of weather or commercials on the television.

3. In role-playing games, metagaming is a term often used to describe players’ use of assumed characteristics of the game. In particular, metagaming often refers to having a character act on knowledge that only the player has access to (such as tricking a medusa to stare at a mirror when the character has never even heard of medusas and should not be aware of their petrifying stare). For instance, a player might adjust his character’s actions if the player has some foreknowledge of the long-term intentions of the gamemaster, or, more commonly, the GM’s tendency to have (or not to have) mercy on players whose characters do things that would cause them to fail at their objectives.